Halfway Done…Looking Back while Running Forward

Samantha Strub

(June, 2011) It’s surreal to be sitting here with the reality that I’m now a junior in college. I’m halfway done. Soon I will be starting internships and applying for jobs to start my career. It doesn’t seem like this should be happening. It’s all going by so fast; I never thought that was possible. When people said that about my high-school years, I didn’t believe them. For me, high school went by slowly, even though I knew I was making memories to last a lifetime. I couldn’t wait to get out on my own and experience the world. Now that it has happened, however, I just don’t understand how the two years I have been at the Mount have flown by.

It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hustle and bustle of life, so much so that life ends up flying by and you wonder what happened. This seemed to happen to me as I end my sophomore year of college and begin my junior year. I have no idea where the time went!

Sure, it’s nice to continue moving forward and working our way to a better life, and we are always talking with professors, classmates, and friends about what we are going to do as college ends. Yet we seem to be so concerned with moving forward that we miss the wonderful things happening right now. Or some of us look back to the past wondering how events unfolded the way they did. Whichever person you tend to be, you must learn to enjoy and live in the moment and cherish the memories. Though planning and moving forward with your life, you must slow down the pace and soak in the moment. As some people say, you must stop and smell the roses. You stop and smell the flowers because it is a simple enjoyable moment that makes a lasting memory. The busy go-go-go of everyday life doesn’t really matter because after a while you forget about those silly annoyances like grades on a paper or a test, drama, and bills.

I’m not saying that high school, college, and a career are unimportant. They are incredibly important because they provide the necessities of life. However, the lasting memories come from stopping to smell the roses. It’s the memories of making silly jokes or sayings, goofing around, or spending lazy days and crazy nights with your family and friends that stick out as you ride through life. One of the most memorable is when some of my friends and I were up late studying for a test and we had to come up with memory devices and we come up with some crazy and stupid ones in order to remember the lists. When it came time to the test everyone could remember it because we had laughed for hours over the memory devices that we came up with. As I reflect back on my first two years of college and look forward to the new years to come, these are the experiences that I remember they are your fondest memories because they are closest to your heart. Everyone, please think back to your high school and college days; the times you remember with the friends you made, the hard work you put in and the crazy times you shared with others. I remember the supposed-to-be homework parties that my close friends and I had, when we actually needed to get studying done and ended up staying up really late because we couldn’t stop talking and laughing. The spontaneous car rides at midnight, the tickle fights, numerous inside jokes, and other memories, like the one night that we drove to IHOP at 2am because we had a terrible craving for pancakes.

It warms my heart to look back on these memories of my past years of college and high school; I only have one question, where did the time go? I offer one piece of advice as well: don’t forget as life moves by you to stop and smell the sweet and lasting memories.

Read past editions of Samantha Strub's Four Years at the Mount